so I take it they never even tried to provide any monetary concessions for all the trouble you've had?

what a sad state of affairs. I mean, if this is really an issue for a good chunk of people, it's really bad form for them not to acknowledge and try to fix it.

On my end, I'm going to try the signal amp they suggested but I'm highly skeptical that's the issue. if it doesn't work, I'm returning the box back to Amazon and cancelling my lifetime service.

what BS on the part of TiVo.

They did give me free service for awhile, and I went thru a lot of boxes, but switching out a box for another thats exactly the same is just going to produce the same problems. The last update did help one of the major problems I was having, so now I'm at least able to watch TV with the box, but every few days it does go a bit crazy on me and I have to just unplug everything and let it sit for about 10 minutes and then turn it all back on again.

I dont trust it enough though to use in my main TV room, so its banished to my office for now. Shame to have a $400 box in my office, but oh well. I keep hoping that there will be some update to fix this. I know most the time the engineers are working behind the scenes to fix things that Tivo support doesnt really know about, so its kind of a wait and see situation. I'd love to get a new Roamio, but I wont spend the money on it until I know more. If they cant fix the one I have then I wont give them anymore money, no way.

Oh and I forgot to add, I know that engineering has a fix that is supposed to be included in the Fall 2013 software update that might fix this problem for some people, but its just a "wait and see what happens" situation at this point. Hopefully it will help a lot of people out, and I hope I'm included in that count.

I'd love to get a new Roamio, but I wont spend the money on it until I know more. If they cant fix the one I have then I wont give them anymore money, no way.

You can always buy a Roamio and give it a try and return it within the return window if you find the problem is still there. I know it's early days and I haven't had my Roamio Plus very long, but I have not seen the issue yet whereas with my Elite I would occasionally see the issue (but I really need to give Roamio Plus about 2-3 months of use before calling it fixed for me). The reported "signal strength" and RS corrected/uncorrected are better on Roamio than on my Elite but that could just be software differences.

Last night I installed a signal booster to see if a weak signal was the root of the issue. but, the booster didn't help at all...

However, I noticed last night that it was only Tuner #2 that wouldn't tune channels. I went to the DVR diagnostics under settings and noticed that no matter what channel I was on, Tuners 0,1, and 3 constantly had a reliable lock on a signal, whereas Tuner 2 wouldn't tune anything. I restarted several times to see if Tuner 2 is just a dynamic label or if it's 'hard coded' to an actual tuner. it turns out that the latter was true. so in fact, it looks like (at least in my case) there is a defective tuner.

I called TiVo with this update and they suggested I just return it and get a new one.

I just ordered a new one and hope that the issue doesn't reappear.

Can anyone else check DVR statistics and see if all 4 tuners are picking up a signal (even on the weak signal channels)?

I bought a roamio for OTA yesterday and after I hooked it up, I notice that one of the tuners never seems to work on all (or most) channels.

If i do a "signal strength" diagnostic, all channels get signal, in the green. Then I stop diag and the first, second and third tuner seem to catch all channels, but the 4th, just a handful.

I bought the un-powered antenna ClearStrem1 Convertible, suggested by TiVo, but it made no difference.

Really horrible when one tuner might be on CBS, but another tuner can't catch it and toggling back and forth between them changes nothing.

My 4.5 yo dual tuner HD works perfectly on both tuners.

I guess I'll have to give TiVo a call and possibly do a swap if one of the tuners is defective - assuming it's not a software issue.

Running into the same issues here on Long Island....I'm a longtime Tivo user and Cablevision customer....have always had a great tivo experience over the years with the Series 1, Series 2, and 2 tuner Premier xl. The minute I switched over to the 4 tuner Premier Elite model last year I began getting the V58 errors and dropped signal black screen. I returned my 4 tuner last year for an older 2 tuner xl after many tivo box exchanges and cable card swap outs. I was so excited when the Romeo was announced and had hoped the new 6 tuner unit had resolved the old issues....Within an our after plugging in my Roamio, I started loosing channels that minutes before had been working fine. The channels that drop are always unpredictable which makes it worse. I'm returning the Roamio unit and going back to my 2 Tuner XL until it dies. So disappointed I love the speed and agility of the new Roamio...but at the end of the day I'm using it to watch tv....if the tivo can't reliably keep all the channels in tune...what's the point... I'm highly doubtful Cablevision carries multiple brands of cable cards to try.
Also just want to say how annoying it is that Tivo continually says to me that this is the first they have heard of the issue...when clearly this forum shows that not to be the case.
Anyone have genuine success resolving the issue?
Joe

I've been checking the DVR diagnostics when getting the black screen after changing channels. Its appears the cablecard tuner status is "waiting for a response" from the tuning adapter.

This is the same TA (cisco sta1520) that works fine with my TivoHD. My theory is the tuning adapter isn't supporting 6 SDV steams concurrently. I'm having better results with limiting the tuners (right now 5 with the 88635 code). time will tell if it holds up

I have never used or needed a tuning adapter with Cablevision so that doesn't explain my issues

Have you checked the firmware version on the CableCard? There's a heavy discussion about older firmware not supporting 6 tuners - possible that your CableCard is limited to two? If you browse around in the CableCard diags you should be able to tell how many tuners / sessions allowed. My TivoHD shows the cablecard support 6 even though the Tivo is only using two of them.

The speed of the Roamio is so good it be a shame to return it. Too bad Tivo doesn't have a code to limit the tuners to two for compatibility. I've tried the 8863x code with 2, but seems the smallest that can be specified is 4 (88634)

I've just returned to the TiVo world after getting rid of my Series2 waaay back. I've started using my Roamio yesterday with an OTA antenna (a Winegard FlatWave Amped) and it was working great...until the black screens came. Rebooting or power cycling would resolve it the first few times. Now, it's stuck in a reboot loop on the "Welcome! Starting up." screen. Guess it's time to call TiVo after a whole half-day of use.

A few instances I've had a black screen and a "Channel unavailable" banner 4-5 seconds after a successful tune.

I noticed it on my S3, but it was less obvious as the timeout on the S3 was less than 1 second before the S3 popped up the banner. With the Roamio/S5 the timeout is a bit longer, apparently.

So I'll still do the "4 minute manual recording" method of doing multiple tune attempts on SDV channels. (e.g. record from 9:55 to 9:59 for a 10:00 show for a total of 3 tune attempts). The sting is softened a bit with more tuners. On my S3, about 1/3rd of the manual recordings failed, but they were sacrificial, as the primary season pass recording it preceded had 3 tune attempts to get it right. I rarely lost recordings after I started doing that.

Have you checked the firmware version on the CableCard? There's a heavy discussion about older firmware not supporting 6 tuners - possible that your CableCard is limited to two? If you browse around in the CableCard diags you should be able to tell how many tuners / sessions allowed. My TivoHD shows the cablecard support 6 even though the Tivo is only using two of them.

The speed of the Roamio is so good it be a shame to return it. Too bad Tivo doesn't have a code to limit the tuners to two for compatibility. I've tried the 8863x code with 2, but seems the smallest that can be specified is 4 (88634)

I am also on cablevision on Long Island have noticed sporadic V58 errors. I could have 4 tuners tuning the channel fine and 1 tuner that gets V58.

Just wanted to post a final update on my issue with this. It turns out as I'd suspected, the problem with mine was not the OTA signal strength but a faulty tuner. Once i narrowed things down, i discovered Tuner #2 was consistently not tuning anything.

I returned the box and have been testing the replacement for almost a week now with no V53 errors.

I had this happen today. Last night I recorded a show from an SDV channel. When I turned on the TV today the TiVo was still on that channel but it had a V53 error floating around the screen. It appears that the SDV channel timed out. Unlike the Premiere this didn't require a reboot to recover from though. I simply changed the channel and then changed it back and the channel came back on line.

So it seems like maybe TiVo needs to add some code to send an intermittent tuning request to the TA to keep the channel alive. Although maybe there are some rules against that if the user hasn't actively pressed a button in X minutes. It would sort of defeat the purpose of SDV if a bunch of people were tying up SDV channels they weren't actually watching.

This is happening to me with my Pro (Comcast SA cable card) and is causing some major WAF issues. Is it worth it to swap out the cable card? Reduce from 6 to 4 tuners? I'm open to any work arounds short of returning the Pro and Mini and plugging back in the two Premieres that never had this issue. Although I may have to consider returning as well.

I get either a black screen, and if I switch tuners and come back I get a "Channel not available. Contact your cable provider." message.

I may have stumbled on a fix, but I haven't had it implemented long enough to know yet. I'm not sure if anyone else suggested it yet either as I don't remember this entire thread.

What I did when I kept getting black screens and the like is that I was thinking it was a signal strength issue so I went into the menu and stumbled on the "Channel Scan" selection. When I tried it, it said that it couldn't do it because I had the cable card and TA installed. So I disconnected them and did a full channel scan. It came back with way over 200 channels (to be expected on my pkg). I also saw before I did the scan that when I tried to do the "Test Channels" part, it said I had no digital channels to test!!! This is one of the reasons I thought to do the scan as well.

Well after that was done I backed out into live TV and tuned a bunch of the channels I had issues with and lo and behold they all seemed to tune and get a picture on the first try!

You guys with issues may wan to give that a shot. It's worth a try at least. I know how frustrating it is!

I spoke too soon. I just had the issue again when I came in to start watching some football.

Dave - what brand of cablecard / tuning adapter? I had the issue with Cisco branded. What I noticed in the Tuning Adapter's diagnostics is that the failed channel is normally w/o a frequency and the sdv session status is inactive.

The Tivo DVR diagnostics will either show the tuner with resolution status as "channel not available" -- this is when it prompts to press "SELECT" to try to tune again. Or when getting a black screen, and sometimes V58 or V56, the Tivo DVR diags has the tuner marked as Analog w/o a frequency, the resolution status "pending response". I also noticed that when recording 6 shows simultaneously that the TA diags would only show 2 tuners as active. To me this seems like a problem.

If your using Cisco TA; take a look at the SDV session info (tuning adapter diag menu) and cross reference with the Tivo DVR diagnostics. These statuses were always the case for me. It would be interesting if your failures are consistent.

Btw, does anyone know what the Resolution Status relates too? I assume it related to communications to the tuning adapter which could mean this a Cisco issue that requires new firmware (my odds on favorite). Otherwise it could be that tuner is failing to tune certain frequencies that are dynamically returned by the tuning adapter (my outside theory).

My experiences are in the orlando brighthouse area. It was very easy to reproduce for me. Anytime I loaded up more than 2 SDV channels these were the errors I received. Unfortunately, I had to return the Roamio yesterday (was closing in on Bestbuy's lousy 15 day return policy). I might try again in a few months. Hopefully by then Tivo and / or Cisco will do something to resolve these issues.

@TiVoMargret - any possibility of us getting a 88632 code until this issue is resolved with Cisco tuning adapters? Reports of 2 tuners working (TivoHD and Premier) make this a potential work-around for those of us effected.

@TiVoMargret - any possibility of us getting a 88632 code until this issue is resolved with Cisco tuning adapters? Reports of 2 tuners working (TivoHD and Premier) make this a potential work-around for those of us effected.

The couple times I checked the diagnostics when I had the issue, it's always been tuner 3 on my SA cable card. Note that this is the 4th tuner (out of 0-5). I saw someone else mention tuner 3 seemed to be their problem tuner rather consistently as well. Now if others see tuner 3 as the issue, I'd be very happy to just disable that one tuner and go with 5 total until there's a fix. Wonder if that's possible.

I did try one thing today with my connectivity. My signal seems to always be at 100 and SNR at around 41. But I occasionally get 2-3 seconds of pixelation when watching shows. Never had that with my 2 Premieres. So I bypassed my 8-way coax splitter and am going directly to the Roamio after a 2 way splitter for the cable modem. We'll see if that helps at all, but I'm not holding my breath.

Dave - what brand of cablecard / tuning adapter? I had the issue with Cisco branded. What I noticed in the Tuning Adapter's diagnostics is that the failed channel is normally w/o a frequency and the sdv session status is inactive.

The Tivo DVR diagnostics will either show the tuner with resolution status as "channel not available" -- this is when it prompts to press "SELECT" to try to tune again. Or when getting a black screen, and sometimes V58 or V56, the Tivo DVR diags has the tuner marked as Analog w/o a frequency, the resolution status "pending response". I also noticed that when recording 6 shows simultaneously that the TA diags would only show 2 tuners as active. To me this seems like a problem.

If your using Cisco TA; take a look at the SDV session info (tuning adapter diag menu) and cross reference with the Tivo DVR diagnostics. These statuses were always the case for me. It would be interesting if your failures are consistent.

Btw, does anyone know what the Resolution Status relates too? I assume it related to communications to the tuning adapter which could mean this a Cisco issue that requires new firmware (my odds on favorite). Otherwise it could be that tuner is failing to tune certain frequencies that are dynamically returned by the tuning adapter (my outside theory).

My experiences are in the orlando brighthouse area. It was very easy to reproduce for me. Anytime I loaded up more than 2 SDV channels these were the errors I received. Unfortunately, I had to return the Roamio yesterday (was closing in on Bestbuy's lousy 15 day return policy). I might try again in a few months. Hopefully by then Tivo and / or Cisco will do something to resolve these issues.

@TiVoMargret - any possibility of us getting a 88632 code until this issue is resolved with Cisco tuning adapters? Reports of 2 tuners working (TivoHD and Premier) make this a potential work-around for those of us effected.

James

Cisco CC and SA TA. I'll try to do some more testing today and get back to you. Thanks for the info!

I just bought a Roamio (basic) after 8 years of perfect service on a series 2. I felt it was time for an upgrade. That was the biggest mistake of my life. I have TWC and a tuner box. Within 15 minutes of plugging it in, I had premium channels drop in/out. Within a day, the channels never came back. Nothing but black screen on 75% of my channels. I contacted TWC. They came to my house, looked at the tivo confused for an hour, and said it was a tivo issue. I contacted Tivo, and they said it was a Time Warner issue. Also, during certain programming, I noticed the trick plays don't work (like NFL games in HD). Debating on buying the bullet and just going with a TWC DVR and save myself the hassle.

I just bought a Roamio (basic) after 8 years of perfect service on a series 2. I felt it was time for an upgrade. That was the biggest mistake of my life. I have TWC and a tuner box. Within 15 minutes of plugging it in, I had premium channels drop in/out. Within a day, the channels never came back. Nothing but black screen on 75% of my channels. I contacted TWC. They came to my house, looked at the tivo confused for an hour, and said it was a tivo issue. I contacted Tivo, and they said it was a Time Warner issue. Also, during certain programming, I noticed the trick plays don't work (like NFL games in HD). Debating on buying the bullet and just going with a TWC DVR and save myself the hassle.

Digital cable and such is a whole other world. I would say you likely have a poor quality signal from cable company. When they came out, they SHOULD have checked your levels...

Digital cable and such is a whole other world. I would say you likely have a poor quality signal from cable company. When they came out, they SHOULD have checked your levels...

There are too many of these reports on SDV especially when the tuning adapter is a Cisco STA 1520. My signal levels are 98-100 w/ SNR 37-40.

We need to voice these issues in a productive manner to Tivo representatives so they can get attention. I emailed Tivo Margret today and she responded with in minutes! Amazing.

She recommended that next time you are on the black screen or channel not available message, and you have more than 2 SDV channels tuned, please enter 9-1-1-CLEAR and 7-7-7-CLEAR and then Connect to the TiVo Service *TWICE*. Then email margret@tivo.com with your TiVo Service Number and the date/time of the problem. This will provide Tivo the logs to see what is going on.

Ugh, wish I'd seen these threads before wasting $1500 on a Roamio Pro and minis to replace my flawless HD units ...

Clearly Comcast insisting its a Roamio problem is true ...

I experienced this 5-6 times in the first month of owning my Roamio (had mine within a week or so of availability). But I've not seen the issue in many, many weeks. Probably not since late Sept or early Oct. The only thing I changed was the coax cable from the outlet to the Roamio. Signal readings didn't really change, so not sure if that's what helped. But something did.

Nah, don't buy that argument from them. IMHO its the flaky fragmented Cablecard (and TA) firmware versions scattered across various cable operators that's causing these problems. jumping up from 2 tuners has exposed a whole host of issues.. Keep an HD as a backup for recording must-see-tv until it all of it sorts out.